sexuality and widows and religion

I have a dear friend who posted about her struggles with the fact that she is sexually active again three years after her husband died. She had assumed that she would remain celibate until she had remarried, and met a wonderful man, and well, you get the picture. She is dealing with a lot of guilt, and I wrote the following messages in reply to hers:

My starting place in talking about this as a Christian is that the Bible is not necessarily the final word. We as the church continue to experience the Spirit of God. And the Bible, in my opinion, is a human document created out of our experience of the divine. It must be interpreted within the historical and social and religious context of the community that wrote it.

The reason I point this out is I have no Biblical support whatsoever for what I am about to say. But at the same time, there is plenty of Biblical support for things we would not and should not tolerate today - bigamy, forced marriages, death penalty, slavery, etc. - and the church communities have moved past these things because of our experience of the Spirit.I grant that not all - and maybe not you - will agree with the above statements, but it is my perspective as a religious man.

Now, getting to the juicy stuff, I believe there are basically two kinds of sex. There is the kind of sex that ties our hearts together as intimate couples. And there is the kind that refuses to be bound, that is more for the gratification of our own desires. The first kind is ideal, and the second kind is less than ideal.And the bottom line in my mind is that both can happen within a marriage, and both can happen outside of marriage. I know because I have had both kinds inside of marriage, and I have had both kinds outside of marriage.

I know you well enough to know that what you are doing is the right kind of sex. You are not with this man for a fling and for gratification. There comes a time in a relationship that demands sex, I think, in order to promote the fullness of expression between a couple. I certainly don't want to be seen as promoting a life of wanton lust and perversion. But sex can be, is, and I say even should be a part of a couple's merging together. We wait for marriage now until the process of merging is basically completed, which is unique in history to our time and culture.

I will certainly not be casting stones today. I hope this brings you some measure of peace.




I spent several years in middle and high school thinking I wanted to be a priest. I think that part of that is a nod to my very spiritual nature. But I also think a lot of it was the fact that I was so unsure of myself as a sexual being, and becoming a priest and hence a celibate would remove all of that from me.

I was a sophomore in high school, and I went on a retreat with the youth group, and we were sitting around a campfire one night. And people had guitars and people were singing different songs, and one of the priests who had come to say Mass for us the next played and sang Annie's song by John Denver: "You fill up my senses, like a night in the forest, ......" It was maybe the most erotic song I have ever heard in my whole life. And in that moment I knew I would never be a priest deep in my soul. I saw in a flash that even this priest was a sexual being and had to deal with that.

I had thought I would remain celibate until marriage. And then Becky came along, and kept coming, and that sure was fun, lol. Becky put it very succinctly to me as was her particular skill: you thought you could be celibate right up until the moment someone was willing to have sex with you. I think that says it quite right.

It is even more true for me now as a widower than it was as a college kid. Because now I know what I am missing. I mean, we all thought we knew how awesome sex would be, and none of us even came close to realizing it is as good as it is. And now, damn it, we know. And we go without for so long as we are grieving and focused on other things. And it sucks. And then we find someone attracted to us, and we are attracted back, and it is not just that we are supposed to not drink, but we are supposed to die of thirst while standing neck high in a freaking river.

Or at least that is how it felt and feels to me. I am, after all, but a man. There are some things I can't understand. I don't understand the thrill of gambling and being willing to blow your life's work away on an outcome of a game or the turn of a card. I don't understand the attraction of being drunk or high. They never had any appeal to me, and I have treated some people in my life harshly because I didn't understand them. But this one, I get.